


a body that won't

by chateauofmyheart



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Drug Addiction, Gen, Ghosts, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Inspired by Poetry, Psychological Trauma, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 12:01:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18872812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chateauofmyheart/pseuds/chateauofmyheart
Summary: Klaus uses. Ben doesn't get it.





	a body that won't

_You are a body that won’t, that can’t_  
_shiver, telling my body to hold still. & there are_  
_no ghosts here._  
_— Michael Wasson, from “Self-Portrait &/ Or Aubade With Is It Morning Already?” published in Cloudthroat_

 

 

Ben isn’t there the first time Klaus overdoses. 

He was only sixteen then, alone in a torn jacket and stolen trousers. He swallows down too big a handful and it comes back up, but only after he’s been crumpled like a discarded wrapper against the bricks for several hours. It’s a miracle no one finds him, but its ‘95 and everyone has bigger problems.

At home he washes off the smell of vomit in the dark. The shower beats his skin and he can almost feel the bruises forming, but the mirror shows him only too-pale skin and bloodshot eyes.

His memories are all a blur. His head aches like it never has before.  
He swallows another pill.

 

(What he doesn’t remember:

1\. Pogo’s frown in the window he turned his back on, the sigh as he slipped away again

2\. His dealer’s shaking hands, the rattle of pills in his pockets, his frantic eyes

3\. Bricks digging into his spine as he staggered back, vision going blurry

4\. The way his skin went blue, his lips went purple, his pupils contracting and expanding, the way he stopped breathing and choked and choked and choked-

 

What he does:

1\. Grime along every edge of that empty, dark alleyway and the empty coke can by his feet as he curled up, head spinning and pills burning a hole in his stomach

2\. The fever feeling of fading away, but stronger and sharper and wrong, the feeling of dread winding up his gut

but most importantly

3\. The _quiet_ )

 

 

* * *

 

 

The drugs work so well as long as his eyes are open. They block the ghosts (except Ben) and Klaus can hear himself stop thinking with every sweet high.

But what good is blocking the real ghosts if there’s even more of them behind his eyelids? Every night the lights go out and Klaus is surrounded again, no matter what chemical is melting his brain.

(Klaus starts leaving the lights on by age twelve. The ghosts are braver in the dark, but a string of fairy lights isn’t going to stop them from grasping for him with cold, rotting hands and screaming with ripped up vocal chords.)

Eventually, he stops sleeping.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_“Your arm is twitching.”_

_Klaus rubs his arm, feeling the muscles spasm, and Ben watches him from over the top of a book. Klaus grins best he can, already side-tracked by the smell of cookies in the kitchen. The book closes._

_“Doesn’t it feel weird?” Ben asks._

_Klaus laughs, rolling over onto his stomach to face Ben on his little bed. “Of course it does!” he crows. He’s too high to care about the gentle worry hiding in Ben’s eyes._

_The book opens again. Klaus wanders off to the kitchen._

 

 

* * *

 

 

Ben doesn’t get it.

Before, when he was still able to wrap his warm arms around Klaus’s bony shoulders, he hadn’t understood it, had never learned to let himself escape like Klaus and like Diego, like Allison, definitely never like Five (still alive, as far as Klaus could allow himself to believe). The monsters in his stomach had never let him slip away.

Now, in death, he watches through a veil as the living dance around him, _through_ him, with dull eyes. He’s detached from the rat race of survival, the passage of time. He sees the aching, desperate fear in Klaus’s eyes and _still doesn’t get it._

 

 

* * *

 

 

Ben says, “Klaus, you need to stop.”

Klaus cradles the needle in his hands. He can already taste the numbness. 

Ben says, “Klaus, please.”

When Klaus is numb, it doesn’t even hurt to hear the way Ben’s voice cracks.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_He drinks at Ben’s funeral. One of those little bottles of vodka, one he’d slipped from a hotel he’d been brought to by a “friend”, pulled out of his pocket every few minutes until it’s gone. The damp cold of fall makes his lips numb. He watches his siblings try not to cry and realizes it’s not just his lips._

_Ben stands beside him._

_Klaus doesn’t look him in the eyes, instead looks at the statue that doesn’t even look like Ben and wishes, selfishly, through the vodka haze, that his brother were not dead, if only so he could have the quiet again._

_(Ben was close, much closer than any of the others, but he never did understand. Why Klaus drinks and smokes and swallows and injects and avoids sleep like a lab rat avoids the electric shock.)_

 

 

* * *

 

 

Ben tells him to stop drinking. Klaus can barely hear him over the sound of his own retching. Ben follows him into the seedy clubs and the humid bars and the rank alleyways, always telling him to _stop stop stop_ but Klaus stopped listening to anyone after the man with the pills in his pockets said “here, these will make the pain go away” and the pain came back.

Besides, apart from Ben, the ghosts are so quiet. They blur and they hover at the edges, voices drowned out by the buzzing in his ears, empty bodies scratched out from his mind as it collapses in on itself. 

Klaus has no idea how Ben sticks around, but the aching, lonely parts of him are grateful.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“I know you’re scared, Klaus, just like when we were with Dad. Trust me, I know what it’s like, but at this rate you’re going to end up-”

“You _don’t_ know what it’s like! How could you possibly, you’re _dead-_ ”

 

 

 

“Ben, I’m sorry.”

“Just don’t take anymore of that stuff, alright?”

“I won’t, I promise, Ben, just please don’t leave again, I don’t know what I’d do without you-”

Ben smiles at him, a brittle twist of lips. “You’d end up like me.”

Klaus doesn’t dare tell him that it doesn’t sound like such a bad thing.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Ben has never seen the ghosts, in all their miserable glory. He’s lucky, in that way. 

He doesn’t understand what Klaus sees every time he closes his eyes, doesn’t hear what Klaus hears every time he sleeps long enough to have nightmares. Ben can see the ghosts now but he _can’t_ , because Klaus is never sober enough to let them in. 

There’s a small, twisted part of himself that whispers that he’s protecting Ben like this, doing this, and Klaus lets it be a louder whenever he presses a needle tip to his arm.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“That isn’t good for you.”

Klaus doesn’t look up from the line he’s making with an old Metro card. Ben’s judgemental gaze sits heavy on the back of his head, familiar like an old church hat.

“You think I don’t know that?”

“Then _why._ ”

“What other option do I have, huh? Please enlighten me, dearest Ben, what can I do, what else is there that gets rid of the fucking ghosts-”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Ben says “stop” and Klaus can’t explain to him that he _can’t_ , that without these vices his mind would collapse under the weight of itself, his bones would splinter and his blood would run all out and his skull would crack open, faced with the ghosts that everyone carries along with themselves.

Everyone dies, but only some stay. 

 

(He wishes he could put every ghost to rest.)

**Author's Note:**

> i may make a series of drabbles like this, inspired by poetry, because there's so much to write about in this fandom- especially klaus, considering the sheer amount of trauma he's been through
> 
> i'm chateauofmymind on tumblr if you wanna chat or hear me post about whatever :)


End file.
